The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances

Peter S. Beagle

2004 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire winner

The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances celebrates the beginnings of Peter S. Beagle’s extraordinary career as a fantasist. This delightful collection contains seven stories and three essays, all by the author of The Last Unicorn, one of the most popular storytellers in the history of the fantasy field.

The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances

by Peter S. Beagle

ISBN: 1892391090

Published: 2003

Available Format(s): Trade Paperback

Peter S. Beagle’s The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances celebrates the beginning of Beagle’s extraordinary career as a fantasist. Widely available for the first time and with a new preface by the author, this delightful book contains seven short stories and three essays by one of the most popular authors in the history of the fantasy field.

The Last Unicorn, Beagle’s most beloved novel, was an underground best-seller in the late 1960s and 1970s and is still in print and enchanting new readers today. It reached an audience far beyond the market for fantasy books, tying in with an emerging counter-culture and selling hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies. The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche contains two of Beagle’s popular unicorn stories, “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros” and “Julie’s Unicorn,” as well as “Lila the Werewolf” (anthologized in the Oxford Book of Fantasy) and a tribute to J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Naga.”

“A celebration of Peter Beagle.”
—Washington Post Book World

“…Mixes classic tales with new gems, early stories, and various nonfiction. Beagle’s essay about ‘D. H. Lawrence in Taos’is worth the price of the book.”
—The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: 11th Annual Collection

“…This collection proves just how essential Beagle is to modern fantasy. Without Beagle’s early example we’d have no Blaylock or Powers…. A story like ‘The Naga’ is worthy of inclusion in the Arabian Nights.”
—Asimov’s Science Fiction

“…A nicely designed collection of Peter Beagle’s best short work.”
—Mythprint

“Werewolves, Unicorns, the Dreadful Specter of Death at a Ball—you may think you’ve read these stories before. Peter S. Beagle demonstrates most eloquently that unless you’ve read his versions, you haven’t read these stories at all. Everything Beagle touches, he makes new. Every sentence he shapes encapsulates a song. This is both a delightful and moving collection.”
—Michael Bishop

“Peter S. Beagle is the magician we all apprenticed ourselves to. Before all the endless series and shared-world novels, Beagle was there to show us the amazing possibilities waiting in the worlds of fantasy, and he is still one of the masters by which the rest of the field is measured. I envy people reading these stories for the first time.”
—Lisa Goldstein, author of The Uncertain Places

“Peter S. Beagle would be one of the century’s great writers in any arena he chose; we readers must feel blessed that Beagle picked fantasy as a homeland. Magic pumps like blood through the veins of his stories. Imparting passionately breathing, singing, laughing reality to the marvelous is his great gift to us all.”
—Edward Bryant

“Peter S. Beagle is our best modern fabulist in the tradition of Hawthorne and Twain. From the dark pride in the story “Come Lady Death” to the dignity and love rising from a rhino-emblazoned philosophy, the stories in this book make the Fantastic become real, the Real both dark and lovely.”
—Jack Cady

Peter S. Beagle is the best-selling author of The Last Unicorn, which has sold a reported five million copies since its initial publication in 1968. His other novels include A Fine & Private Place, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. His short fiction has been collected in four volumes by Tachyon Publications, including The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, The Line Between, We Never Talk About My Brother, and Sleight of Hand. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire awards and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Praise for Peter S. Beagle

“…One of my favorite writers.”
—Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet

“Peter S. Beagle illuminates with his own particular magic such commonplace matters as ghosts, unicorns, and werewolves. For years a loving readership has consulted him as an expert on those hearts’ reasons that reason does not know.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness

“The only contemporary to remind one of Tolkien.”
—Booklist

“Peter S. Beagle is (in no particular order) a wonderful writer, a fine human being, and a bandit prince out to steal readers’ hearts.”
—Tad Williams, author of Tailchaser’s Song and The Very Best of Tad Williams

“It’s a fully rounded region, this other world of Peter Beagle’s imagination…an originality…that is wholly his own.”
—Kirkus

“[Beagle] has been compared, not unreasonably, with Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien, but he stands squarely—and triumphantly on his own feet.”
—Saturday Review

“Not only does Peter Beagle make his fantasy worlds come vividly, beautifully alive; he does it for the people who enter them.”
—Poul Anderson, author of The High Crusade

“Peter S. Beagle is the magician we all apprenticed ourselves to. Before all the endless series and shared-world novels, Beagle was there to show us the amazing possibilities waiting in the worlds of fantasy, and he is still one of the masters by which the rest of the field is measured.”
—Lisa Goldstein, author of The Uncertain Places and The Red Magician

“Peter S. Beagle would be one of the century’s great writers in any arena he chose; we readers must feel blessed that Beagle picked fantasy as a homeland. Magic pumps like blood through the veins of his stories. Imparting passionately breathing, singing, laughing reality to the marvelous is his great gift to us all.”
—Edward Bryant, author of Cinnabar

Praise for Sleight of Hand

“Multiple Hugo and Nebula award–winning Beagle opens readers’ eyes to wonder with his latest collection of 13 short stories. Each piece bridges the rich intersection of fantasy and fairy tale, reality and possibility, exploring predestination, fate, and the power of love through characters that come to vivid, three-dimensional life within a few short pages. Beagle’s lyrical writing is set in a wide range of landscapes both familiar and fresh, with twists on Jack and the Beanstalk, monsters and dragons, a singing enchantress, ghostly photographs, and a modern werewolf tale. ‘The Bridge Partner’ is more noir than fantasy yet fits within the collection quite well, as does the deeply chilling, experimental, and dark ‘Dirae.’ ‘The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon’ features two lost children and an encounter with an early version of Schmendrick the Magician from his classic novel, The Last Unicorn. Each story is introduced with some background about its origin.”
—Library Journal

“Satisfying.”
—Washington Post Book World

“This 13-story anthology will entice even the most jaded reader to read long hours into the night…. Sleight of Hand will beguile and enchant.”
—New York Journal of Books

“Beagle still has the power to surprise…a new collection of stories by one of the all-time greats.”
—The Guardian

“Sleight of Hand is a strong collection by an author whose skill has only improved with time…a must-have.”
—Tor.com

“Few can match [Beagle] when it comes to a particular mix of the fantastic and the ordinary, with a tinge of nostalgia. As one character observes, the magic is in the telling, always.”
—Interzone

“After reading Sleight of Hand, I know exactly why Beagle has this mythic reputation as one of the best of the best in fantasy and science-fiction literary circles. The man is amazing. Nearly every story in this collection was like a spell.”
—Drunken Zombie

“Demonstrates yet again why [Beagle’s] perhaps the finest fantasy writer at short lengths working today.”
—Locus

“…not only one of our greatest fantasists, but one of our greatest writers, a magic realist worthy of consideration with such writers as Marquez, Allende, and even Borges.”
—The American Culture

“A Fine & Private Place is just as wonderful as I remembered it to be: beautifully written, the characters warmly drawn, the pages filled with conversations that run the gamut of the human condition…it’s a great book in a lovely affordable package.”
—Fantasy & Science Fiction

“Delightful!”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“A sweet, sad, and smart novel about life, death and love…a book that has endured for a reason.”
—The Agony Column

“A wonderful work of literature…a gem of a novel.”
—BookLoons

“Over a cold beverage and a hot bowl of chili, Peter Beagle recently told me how he came to write A Fine & Private Place. He was just 19 years old at the time, the length of time that Mr. Rebeck spent in that cemetery. He was working as a counselor at a boys’ summer camp. Once the campers were settled for the night there wasn’t much for the counselors to do. Those who had sweethearts at the girls’ camp across the lake would borrow canoes and paddle across to see them. Peter had no such luck, he told me, so he warmed up his rattly little portable typewriter, cracked open a ream of paper, and starting writing a book. We are all incredibly lucky that Peter had no girlfriend that summer.”
—Dick Lupoff, SF Site

“One of the great fantasy novels of all time.”
—ICCFA Magazine

“An amazing read…. If fantastically developed characters trapped between love and death appeal to you, this is a nearly perfect book.”
—Paperblog